the twelfth day is finally upon us... and today I'm bringing you something I think quite a lot of people have been waiting for. a game I actually played through to the end because I legitimately enjoyed it that much. It's a strategy game, more or less based on Super Robot Wars gameplay-wise (also the music is stolen directly from the second GB entry in the series), but featuring characters from everyone's favourite monster franchise(s). And I have like four variations on it, so let's take them in order:
Pokemon Sapphire / Pocket Monster Sapphire
This is the first version I played, and probably the original. There's lots more info, along with pics of the box and stuff, here. This version actually seems to have been published by a company called "New Game Color Advance", using art straight from the official GBA Sapphire, as opposed to Sintax's usual ... idiosyncratic approach. (but don't worry, the next version has plenty of that)
Well we have Sapphire, so obviously there has to be Ruby too... Or Carbuncle, as Sintax prefer to call it. The title screen and some of the stage graphics are different, but I think everything else is the same as Sapphire. I suspect this one was made after Sapphire, though, if only because its title screen is fairly shoddy-looking compared to Sapphire's nice one. Qiezei has a bunch of scans here.
2003 Kou Dai Guai Shou - Lan Bao Shi (2003口袋怪獸-藍寶石)
The Chinese version of Sapphire - seems about the same, aside from being in Chinese.
I should note that I wasn't able to get a consistent dump of this one; my first dump worked, but all the subsequent ones didn't, so I can't verify whether it's a good dump or not.
and finally.. the Digimon version! Basically the same thing but with different graphics. Strangely they bothered to redo the stage graphics again, but still left a few Pokemon and Pokeballs and other Pokestuff in the game. In one of the screenshots you can even see a Pokemon centre that they added into this version.
the next (ooh second to last) game is a cute little puzzle-ish platformer based on the Disney movie Lilo & Stitch. what's awesome here is I have both the English and Chinese versions to release today - this never, ever happens (except the one other time it might happen), so enjoy it! The English version is called Space Baby on the cart and "The Firmament Baby" in-game, the Chinese is called Tai Kong Bao Bei (太空寶貝) everywhere. But I'm just going to call it Space Baby for convenience because I like that name.
Now this is unusual. This game - called Xiao Tai Ji - Shen Hua Li Xian (小太极-神话历险)
- is based on a Taiwanese cartoon by the name of Taichi Kid - and, so what? you might think. Sintax based games on tons of shit. But this game...
wait for it
was LICENSED by the cartoon's production company! seriously! it's right here on the official website and everything!
The game itself isn't half bad either (although the music is stolen from Lemmings as usual). you should definitely try this one! There was also an English version called "Little Taichi: The adventrure of myth" which.. I'd quite like to find.
this game is called 2003 Crash II Advance, and I've never played any of the original Crash Bandicoot games, but judging from like one minute's research on youtube they've done a pretty good job of capturing the gameplay of the originals.
Well the world hasn't ended yet, so how about an extra game? I figured out how to get this one working right in the middle of Sintaxmas, but it kinda sucks so I was going to save it for later. But for the apocalypse, why not?
It's called San Guo Wu Shang 5 (叁國無雙5) on the cart and, amazingly, "Bynasty Warriors Advance 5" on the title screen, but it's based on the engine from Sintax's port(?) of Dragonball: Advance Adventure, right down to the status bar still saying "Gokou". I blogged about it here a while back. (oh and don't be fooled by the GBA size cart, it's GBC through and through)
